Wow, send a bill to the company and ask them to renew their site license for the emacs config. Or opensource what you can of it and remove the competitive advantage they have.
As much as I'm a fan of Emacs, I don't think a .emacs file had much to do with that startup's success. He just wanted to see the UX and features that were possible for a particular purpose, for ideas and competitive analysis. But I did opensource a minority of the bits. :) https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs/
Totally believeable. I had one research prototype that invoked an Emacs process for every Web CGI request. To get that kind of R&D rapid development productivity, I then had to start building out libraries for Scheme. :)